All Hallows Eve

Only one trick-or-treater!

What's up with that? What am I gonna do with all those Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Snickers Bars, and Milky Ways?

A good day at work brings to a close a good week at work. Several guys I work with took me aside, asked me if I liked it, and told me how impressed they were with my work. Apparently, the plan is for me to become a sort of fill-in guy in the finishing department, moving from sanding to staining to glazing to scuffing on an as-needed basis. That sounds great. Every day will be a variety, and I'll master the whole process. Eventually, maybe I'll move out onto the shop floor. But maybe not. It seems that the guys who work in finishing tend to get all the overtime, and we love overtime. We really love overtime.

(Pause for a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup break.)

I'm staying in tonight. I don't feel any particular inclination to head out into the wide world. Tomorrow will be a busy day. There's a lot of wood to be chopped, and I have to go up to Dublin to get my Pennsylvania Driver's License. Tomorrow night, I think I'll head down to Philadelphia and go to the Bike Stop. It's the first Saturday of the month, and that means that there's a dress code enforced in the Pit Stop downstairs. Cool.

(Pause for a Milky Way break.)

On Sunday, I'm making a trip up to NYC. The GMSMA Spirituality Special Interest Group I was a part of is having a reunion of sorts. I'm looking forward to it, but in a way, I'm not. An odd thing. The best I can express it is I'm feeling material, rather than spiritual. I'm not spending a lot of time inside my head. Lately, physical activity has been nourishing me. Not Ora but Labora. The feel of the axe handle in my hand. The sound the log makes when it flies apart. The focus on the weld bead. The cold heft of a hunk of steel. The unmistakable perfume of Faithful Companion after a walk in the rain. The way you can taste woodstain after it absorbs into the skin on your hands. Orion riding high in the southeastern sky again. The cool damp of the early morning when I'm heading out to work. Sharing my good roast chicken with my Dad. Latte and a cigar at Starbucks. The smell of burning leaves. Feeling my body melt in the steamroom after a workout.

I see, I hear, I taste, I feel, I smell.

Why wasn't it like this when I lived in the city? Why does it seem in retrospect to be a disembodied experience?

(Pause for a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup break.)

Maybe it has something to do with the way that you tell the change of the seasons not by observing nature (other than the obvious: it's cold! it's hot!) but by wardrobe. Or maybe, it's because New York City is all about sensory overload. You can't take it all in, and so you just shut down. Here, it's all of a piece. And there's a sublime stillness. A calm.

I'm suddenly reminded of a short story I wrote years and years ago. I think when I was in high school.

(Pause for a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup break.)

I think I wrote it when I was in high school, or maybe my freshman year at college. The story was first person omniscient (at least I think it was, it's been a long time since I've analyzed voice in fiction). It had two characters, a grandfather and a granddaughter. The narrator was the grandfather. The situation was that the granddaughters mother had been killed, and the grandfather was now, suddenly, raising his granddaughter. The granddaughter was thirteen. She was awkward, morbid, unhappy, complaining. Their relationship was strained. The granddaughter--I think her name was Adrianna--resented being plucked out of her life with her cool mom in The City and plopped down on the farm of the grandparents she barely knew. Grampa had not had a good relationship with his daughter. Her life and her values was a mystery to him. She had wanted to get away, and she had gotten away.

Things seemed to be going very badly with raising his granddaughter. He was concerned. He didn't know what to say. Should he get angry? Pity for the girl made him suppress this urge. And it had never worked with her mother.

The only action in the story was the grandfather digging a garden in early spring, thinking about the arrangement of the plantings, and what would go where this year. Adrianna was sitting nearby, declining to help as she declined to get involved with anything that he or his wife did. She was sulking and complaining that there was nothing to do. She says something along the lines of, "I wish my mom hadn't died."

Granpa wants to say something, but there's nothing he can think of to say, so he just continues digging. He thinks about how many gardens he's planted in his long life. And how many vegetables he's harvested. And how many gardens he's watched die. And then to plant them again in the Spring. Spring planting, Summer growth, Autumn harvest, Winter death. The cycle endlessly repeated.

"How to get her to understand that?" he asks himself. And this is the Satori, the moment of awakening. His daughter's death was a terrible tragedy, but he found the strength to go on. Because he and his life are wed to the endless repeating cycle of nature: What lives will die, and what dies contains the seeds of new life. Over and over and over again.

"Granpa," was, of course, based on my father. And the story came from a conversation that we really did have, while he was working in the garden, and thirteen year old me was sulking because he wanted me to help him and that meant I couldn't go ride my bike with my friends. I had to stay here and work. My father and I started talking. I can't remember how we got onto the subject.

(Pause here for a Milky Way break.)

And I can't remember what the conversation was all about, but when I asked him how he had managed to find the wherewithal to marry again after surviving two wives, it wasn't odd or out of context or challenging.

I'll always remember his reply: "Death isn't just an end. It's also a beginning. All the plants I planted last Spring are dead. But here I am planting seeds in the ground again."

My father is not given to philosphizing. I hadn't heard him say anything like that before, and I don't think I've heard anything like that since.

(Pause here for a Snickers Bar break.)

So it struck me at the time, and it strikes me now, that he was saying a lot. In fact, I think that day he was telling me everything. Everything, that is, that he had to impart.

Hallowe'en, of course, is the bastard child of some pagan ritual and All Souls' Day. I don't know beans about the pagan ritual, but I do know about All Souls' Day. That's the day when we pray for--or remember, depending on your eschatology--all the souls up in heaven, and particularly, those we loved. It's a day when we remember, and we miss, and think about how we have been changed, and what we've lost. So literally, it's a day when the Dead come back to us. It's a day of haunting, but a welcome haunting.

(Pause here for a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup break.)

Mother. Uncle Bill. Ruby. Nana. Pop. Kathy. Kathleen. And let's not forget Jack, Terry, Matt, George. In the midst of life we are in death.

The spirit is ephemeral, but the flesh is eternal. A cup of tea. A winter morning. Your cheek against a hairy chest. The wind in dead oak leaves. That electric moment when your ass opens up to receive the cock that's trying to get in there. Turpentine. Bacon. Your own sweat burning your eyes. Falling snow. The Milky Way. Mahler's Kindertodtenlieder. Your heart pounding when you slam on the breaks to avoid hitting a deer. The millionth experience of any of these still smacks of newness. And this must be because it's eternal. Outside of time. Prayer is not as satisfying as oatmeal. A brilliant idea can't keep you warm at night.

Walking my dog in the moonlight, my belly full of roast chicken, the air cold and crisp convinces me of one thing: there is no death. This is forever.

And now, I think I'll have a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.

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